One person can’t solve 2024’s largest game(s)

When Derek Yu, the creator of Spelunky, partnered with a crew of brilliant designers to release a collection of 50 games (yes, 50 video games!) I assumed that I knew the outcome: I would lose my job, fail as a father, and be discovered years from now in an abandoned shack in the forest, ensconced by my filth and mumbling “You can’t take me away! I still have four more games to complete!”

And yet, here I am, a mere day after UFO 50’s release, reading about this massive collection of video games rather than playing it. Is this self-preservation? Personal growth? Of course not.

After hours of frantic hopping from one game to the next, I accepted that one person couldn’t, nay, shouldn’t be responsible for appreciating this gargantuan masterwork. Rather, appreciation of UFO 50 is a team sport. And the UFO 50 subreddit is its field.

Like this year’s Animal Well and Yu’s previous Spelunky games, the collection is filled with yet-to-be-cracked codes and still-hidden treasures. Along with 50 games, UFO 50 features a backstory of a fictional developer, UFO Soft, along with a terminal that allows players to input code. How those two facts relate, that’s what the subreddit hopes to decipher.

In a recent episode of Simon Parkin’s My Perfect Console podcast, Yu spoke at length about the magic of mystery — how neither The Legend of Zelda nor Dark Souls came with easy answers, with both games inviting players to discover and map their worlds. Now, along with his childhood friend and fellow designer Jon Perry (and a slew of other creatives), Yu has passed that experience to another generation, one that doesn’t untangle a video game’s riddles at home but on a massive social platform.

I’m grateful to this subreddit community for saving me from going into the wilderness alone. I’ll keep my job. I’ll live up to my aspirations as a loving parent. And I mean, like obviously, I will play a disgusting amount of UFO 50’s idle game Pilot Quest — all while reading through the subreddit’s threads, where thousands of fellow fans team up to convert 50 games into one unified adventure.